The Black Arts Movement Author(S): Larry Neal Source: the Drama Review: TDR, Vol

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The Black Arts Movement Author(S): Larry Neal Source: the Drama Review: TDR, Vol The Black Arts Movement Author(s): Larry Neal Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 12, No. 4, Black Theatre (Summer, 1968), pp. 28-39 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1144377 Accessed: 13/08/2010 21:18 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Drama Review: TDR. http://www.jstor.org 29 The Black Arts Movement LARRYNEAL 1. The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that al- ienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It pro- poses a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American's desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics. Recently, these two movements have begun to merge: the political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists. A main tenet of Black Power is the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms. The Black artist has made the same point in the context of aesthetics. The two movements postulate that there are in fact and in spirit two Americas-one black, one white. The Black artist takes this to mean that his primary duty is to speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people. Therefore, the main thrust of this new breed of contemporary writers is to confront the contradictions arising out of the Black man's experience in the racist West. Currently, these writers are re-evaluating western aesthetics, the traditional role of the writer, and the social function of art. Implicit in this re-evaluation is the need to develop a "black aesthet- ic." It is the opinion of many Black writers, I among them, that the Western aesthet- ic has run its course: it is impossible to construct anything meaningful within its decaying structure. We advocate a cultural revolution in art and ideas. The cultural values inherent in western history must either be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably find that even radicalization is impossible. In fact, what is needed is a whole new system of ideas. Poet Don L. Lee expresses it: ... We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetuators of evil. It's time for DuBois, Nat Turner, and Kwame Nkrumah. As Frantz Fanon points out: de- stroy the culture and you destroy the people. This must not happen. Black artists are :::::::2~~~~~~~~~~~-. -./-:;- -:: 9:: 0 - i:i-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.ii. S:-:? S 9 5 - -i-i-i:i~~~~~~~~~-:ii ~~~~~~~ 0i 5: 5 55iiii? ~~~~:~~~~~~~~~~-~-Cg. ~ -~ S - 30 LARRY NEAL culture stabilizers; bringing back old values, and introducing new ones. Black Art will talk to the people and with the will of the people stop impending "protective custody." The Black Arts Movement eschews "protest" literature. It speaks directly to Black people. Implicit in the concept of "protest" literature, as Brother Knight has made clear, is an appeal to white morality: Now any Black man who masters the technique of his particular art form, who adheresto the white aesthetic, and who directs his work toward a white audience is, in one sense, protesting. And implicit in the act of protest is the belief that a change will be forthcoming once the masters are aware of the protestor's "grievance" (the very word connotes begging, supplications to the gods). Only when that belief has faded and protestings end, will Black art begin. Brother Knight also has some interesting statements about the development of a "Black aesthetic": Unless the Black artist establishes a "Black aesthetic" he will have no future at all. To accept the white aesthetic is to accept and validate a society that will not allow him to live. The Black artist must create new forms and new values, sing new songs (or purify old ones); and along with other Black authorities, he must create a new history, new symbols, myths and legends (and purify old ones by fire). And the Black artist, in creating his own aesthetic, must be accountable for it only to the Black people. Further, he must hasten his own dissolution as an individual (in the Western sense)-painful though the process may be, having been breast-fed the poison of "individual experience." When we speak of a "Black aesthetic" several things are meant. First, we assume that there is already in existence the basis for such an aesthetic. Essentially, it consists of an African-American cultural tradition. But this aesthetic is finally, by implication, broader than that tradition. It encompasses most of the useable elements of Third World culture. The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world. The new aesthetic is mostly predicated on an Ethics which asks the question: whose vision of the world is finally more meaningful, ours or the white oppressors'? What is truth? Or more precisely, whose truth shall we express, that of the oppressed or of the oppressors? These are basic questions. Black intellectuals of previous decades failed to ask them. Further, national and international affairs demand that we appraise the world in terms of our own interests. It is clear that the question of human survival is at the core of contemporary experience. The Black artist must address himself to this reality in the strongest terms possible. In a context of world upheaval, ethics and aesthetics must interact positively and be consistent with the demands for a more spiritual world. Consequently, the Black Arts Movement is an ethical movement. Ethical, that is, from the viewpoint of the oppressed. And much of the oppression confronting the Third World and Black America is directly traceable to the Euro- American cultural sensibility. This sensibility, anti-human in nature, has, until recent- ly, dominated the psyches of most Black artists and intellectuals; it must be de- stroyed before the Black creative artist can have a meaningful role in the transfor- mation of society. It is this natural reaction to an alien sensibility that informs the cultural attitudes of the Black Arts and the Black Power movement. It is a profound ethical sense that THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT 31 makes a Black artist question a society in which art is one thing and the actions of men another. The Black Arts Movement believes that your ethics and your aesthet- ics are one. That the contradictions between ethics and aesthetics in western society is symptomatic of a dying culture. The term "Black Arts" is of ancient origin, but it was first used in a positive sense by LeRoi Jones: We are unfair And unfair We are black magicians Black arts we make in black labs of the heart The fair are fair and deathly white The day will not save them And we own the night There is also a section of the poem "Black Dada Nihilismus" that carries the same motif. But a fuller amplification of the nature of the new aesthetics appears in the poem "Black Art": Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step. Or black ladies dying of men leaving nickel hearts beating them down. Fuck poems and they are useful, would they shoot come at you, love what you are, breathe like wrestlers, or shudder strangely after peeing. We want live words of the hip world, live flesh & coursing blood. Hearts and Brains Souls splintering fire. We want poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews... Poetry is a concrete function, an action. No more abstractions. Poems are physical entities: fists, daggers, airplane poems, and poems that shoot guns. Poems are trans- formed from physical objects into personal forces: ... Put it on him poem. Strip him naked to the world. Another bad poem cracking steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth Poem scream poison gas on breasts in green berets... Then the poem affirms the integral relationship between Black Art and Black people: ..
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